Everyone and their mother are throwing out their predictions for 2009 nowadays, itâ€s a new fad. Itâ€s like youâ€re not cool anymore if you donâ€t have twitter, a Mac, and a set of random predictions for the next 12 joyous months.

So I decided to throw in a few ideas of my own to be part of the cool crowd again (how much cooler can I be already, you might think, and I wouldnâ€t blame you).

Disclaimer (read it, tough guy)

What this post is:

• about the future of technology and the Internet, 2009 and beyond.
• my ideas on what is going to happen or should happen. If they happen to match someone elseâ€s ideas – it doesnâ€t mean I ripped them off, it just means we share the same opinions and theyâ€re more likely to come true.
• awesome.

What this post is not:

…

I've been involved with the Drizzle project since very soon after it began, working on it on nights and weekends.

That has just changed. As of today, I'm no longer a MySQL Professional Services consultant, instead I'm part of a new division of Sun

Much of my time is to be spent working on Drizzle, with a focus on plugin interfaces and making it work well in Extremely Large distributed environments.

I will be blogging heavily about what I am doing. How I sort that blogging out between my personal LiveJournal, my (mostly unused) Sun employee blog, and maybe some other blog system, remains TBD.

This is going to be fun.

A friend suggested the creation of a "Technical Professional Purity Test", and suggested two questions:

Have you ever have you ever implemented a solution you knew would doom the client?

Have you ever yelled at your manager for interrupting your workflow?


Please, suggest more!

Over in CNET, Matt Asay has posted an article The open-source job shortage, talking about large enterprises' need for developers with deep MySQL experience.

While he is correct about the need for talent with that skillset, there are plenty of effective solutions.

A number of months ago, Harper Reed asked me where he could hire MySQL talent, and I told him to take his existing staff, and run them thru MySQL training. That seems to have worked for him. That's now my stock answer when people ask where they can hire MySQL talent.

When you need to go up to the next level, get and read the book High Performance MySQL, Second Edition. The book is …

Dell has obtained a trademark on the term "Cloud Computing".

http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=77139082

People have been talking about computing in the cloud for years now, and network designers have been using a cloud icon to indicate "services on the internet out there somewhere" for over a decade.

This trademark needs to be killed, it born generic.

Why may LIMIT only take a fixed number? Not even a user variable, let alone an expression.

Wouldn't it be useful to set a user session variable that always gets applied as an implicit limit value?

Both of these things could be done in Drizzle.

Last week I was working with a client that rediscovered a bug where setting expire_logs_days and issuing a flush logs causes the server to crash. It’s MySQL Bug #17733 if you want to have a look. Seeing MySQL crash was enough inspiration to fix something that I and others have wanted to fix in MySQL for years.

Currently a flush logs command tries to flush all of the following logs in order:

• General Log
• Slow Query Log
• Binary Log
• Relay Log
• Store Engine Logs (If available)
• Error Log

The reason I wanted to fix this is because my client was issuing a flush logs to rotate the error log on a server with no replication. The crash was caused by replication. With individual flush logs it’s less likely for this to happen again in the future. People can simply issue a query for the …

Several months ago I was invited to a special FOO camp at the O'Reilly Campus, about social networking and the social graph. One of the things that the ora people did was record an interview video of each attendee. They've now put all those videos up on youtube.

Here is mine.

Have you ever executed a query from the MySQL command line client only to find that the output wrapped and the result is unreadable? In the past you have to run the query again with \G instead of ; or \g to get it to display the output in a vertical mode. My feature in MySQL 6.0.4 fixes that. The auto-vertical-output option tells the command line client to display the results in vertical format if the results are going to be too wide to display horizontally. It does this without re-executing the query because MySQL passes the length of each column in the result set. If the client isn’t able to determine the width of the screen it will default to 80 chars.

This is a continuation of the MySQL User Conference replication notes part one.

The session is opening up talking about failover. The shared disk in this case is drbd. DRBD is a fine product for replicating block devices of single disk systems. It’s made redundant by raid and doesn’t provide as much protection as binary log failover. You can find my notes on why I don’t recomment DRBD for MySQL in drbd in the real world.

Lars went a bit quick through the other two configurations. I’ll try to review the slides and post comments.

The next configuration is using federated. The federated storage engine has many problems that make it almost useless for any production deployment. Mats says, “Federated isn’t the fastest engine in the world”. That’s an understatement. Join on two tables as they describe it is almost …